Discord
by hansolo18
Summary: A story about the holidays, a pack of cigarettes, and one boy who would always be angry.


Daryl had always been angry.

Growing up the way he did, it was amazing his attitude wasn't worse. Amazing that he didn't turn out like Merle, who rose against anything he didn't like or didn't care enough to try to understand. It was amazing he didn't beat women the way both his father and brother did. It was amazing he didn't do half the things the Dixon men were known for.

Daryl never liked the holidays, never particularly had a reason to as a kid. He never got anything for Christmas, his birthday was passed over without a thought, and Thanksgiving was ignored if no scrawny turkey had been bagged in the days before. New Years and the Fourth, were just excuses to get drunk for his father. Not that he ever needed it.

Ironically it was Merle who tried to instill a sense of the holidays in Daryl. For a few years when Merle was in his early teens and Daryl a decade younger, Merle tried to keep up with his birthday, buying a tiny round cake from the corner store, swiping little toys from the dollar store. That ended after his first stint in Juvie.

Daryl was five when he had his first and last Christmas. He had annoyed his father and brother into celebrating it. Merle eyeing the whole thing with suspicion, even as he drug a tiny whip like pine tree into the trailer, planting it in an old coffee can. Watching with narrowed eyes as Daryl hung a paper ornament he made in school on one of the branches.

The fifteen year old let out a sigh as he motioned the younger boy over. Merle caught a bony wrist in hand and stared Daryl in the eye. "Don't get too excited about this little brother. I don't want to see any letters to Santa you hear me? He doesn't exist, he won't come."

Daryl didn't cry at this revelation, just frowned and pulled his arm away. "I know." His response came out bitter and accusing.

Three days before Christmas he mailed a letter anyway, stamp less, the destination scrawled in shaky pen. _Santa, North Pole. _

He couldn't sleep Christmas Eve, rolling and kicking in the bed he and Merle shared before a well-placed elbow made him stop.

Merle pulled him out of bed before the sun rose, throwing him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, tromping out of their bed room and into the main room of the trailer. He dumped Daryl onto the couch and pointed an accusing finger at the bare tree.

"This is why we don't have Christmas, D." The older boy's voice was harsh and loud in the early morning air." We don't mean anything to the old man. We're just a waste of his beer money. He doesn't give a damn about us. It's about time you realized."

Merle left him there, sprawled half off half off the couch like an overcooked noodle, staring at the cluttered trailer wall and the bare tree before it.

Hours later his father wandered out of his room, smelling of booze and sporting blood shot eyes: with a grunt he tossed a small box at his youngest. It landed on the couch beside Daryl with a soft patter.

Daryl looked down to the white and red box as he took it gently in his hands, the clear plastic wrapper scuffed and torn. The words Marlboro stretching across the front and what Daryl knew would be twenty paper wrapped sticks inside.

He started smoking that day. The pack lasted less than two week which was more than enough time for the boy to become hooked and for yellow stains to start to appear on his tiny fingers.

That year would mark the first and last time he smoked. When his pack ran out, he stole from his father to ease the painful need that rose inside him. It didn't take long for his old man to figure it out. He retaliated by giving his youngest boy twenty lashes with the belt, one for each cigarette in the pack.

Daryl stopped smoking after that. Just endured the cravings, the anxiety, the restlessness, and the anger without a saying a word to his father.

The entire experience left him tainted. Even as an adult a simple glimpse at a pack of cigarettes would set his spine tingling in memory of the beating he had received because of them. He would remember how his father had placed an open pack on the table before him. How he made Daryl lean over the pack and clasps the table's rough edge with his fingers. His father made sure each swing of the belt would associate to that red and white pack.

From a young age Daryl came to hate the holidays. The people in the shit town they lived in thought it was because he was a mean son of a bitch. But that wasn't true; his mother didn't make him mean.

No, meanness could be credited to his father.

Anger however, was a trait that would solely be Daryl's.


End file.
